Vista drivers for HP Designjet 750 C Plus further questions

We have a new Dell running Vista 64 bit. We have an HP plotter that does not have a Vista driver available from HP. I asked a question about this before and we purchased a Winline driver for this plotter as a result of that question. The driver is not working correctly. It does not print in color and it prints very slowly. We have been in touch with Winline and Autocad (the software that is printing slowly) and can not seem to solve the problem. We have had a service call on the plotter and it is Ok. I am looking for any suggestions on speeding up the printing and correcting color problems or do we need to change operating system on workstation to XP Pro and if so what potential problems will we have with that?

If that driver does not work, then yes, you should be able to install XP Pro (check your version of Vista to see if you have downgrade rights - and check the model of dell pc to ensure XP drivers are available for it). You'll have to install XP Pro 64 bit. Hp also lists drivers available for XP Pro 64, so you should be good there.

If you click on the obtain software button after selecting Vista 64 bit you will see that under products that will not be supported I think you will see the designjet. When I checked XP 64 bit, I really couldn't tell definitively whether they had a working driver for this printer or not. I was told by one independent service person that HP was offering a $1200 rebate or buy back (something like that) to upgrade to a new plotter. The service person's opinion was that HP was interested in retiring these because they seem to work forever and people are content to keep them and not upgrade, which is exactly where we are--we are happy with this plotter and want to continue to use it. Since I made my original post, we found that one file we were trying to print seemed to be a problem and the Winline driver worked with other files. However, we may still have a problem with sending multiple documents to the printer to be spooled and printed--this seems to slow the printer down significantly.

Follow-up to my comment above--the plotter is not working correctly with Winline driver and Autocad software. It also will not plot pdf files, which may be a function of lack of support by Adobe for 64 bit Vista. Our only solution would seem to be downgrading to XP Pro however we would have to downgrad to XP 32 bit, but I don't know if this is possible--any opinions on that??

I have gone on to install Virtual Box on the Vista machine and install XP and run the Autocad program on XP--so I can use the HP driver for XP 32. So far that is working. It is not an ideal solution but a workaround.